OpenBSD on the Sixth Generation Intel NUC

I recently decided it would be fun to upgrade the hardware on my main OpenBSD machine at home (because, you know, geek). These Intel NUC machines are pretty interesting. They are pretty powerful, support a decent amount of RAM, certain models support internal storage, and they are very low power and low noise. Perfect for a machine that is a shell/email/development box.

The model I chose is the NUC6i3SYH.

Core i3 processor (because my machine is not at all CPU bound)

Very low power consumption (15W)

Supports a 2.5″ SSD

OpenBSD 6.0 boots with the GENERIC kernel; no tuning or tweaking required. Full dmesg is at the end of this post. Hightlights of the hardware include:

Wired network: Intel I219-V using the em(4) driver

Wireless network: Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 8260 using the iwm(4) driver (no support for 802.11ac in OpenBSD at the time of this writing so it’s 802.11n only)

Dual-core CPU with hyperthreading (be sure to boot GENERIC.MP)

The kernel recognizes the Intel SpeedStep capabilities of the CPU and will adjust the CPU’s clock speed as needed (further keeping the power consumption of the machine at a very low level).

If you look closely, you’ll see I’m booting OpenBSD/i386. That’s because I build -stable for all my machines using the i386 architecture. When 6.1 comes out, I will switch over to amd64 at which time this machine will register the rest of its installed memory.